“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Friday, May 16, 2014

Are 1 in 5 Women Really Sexually Assaulted on College Campuses?

If
you were a university administrator and you wanted to know how prevalent a
particular experience was for students on campus, you would probably conduct a
survey that asked a few direct questions about that experience—foremost among
them the question of whether the student had at some point had the experience
you’re interested in. Obvious, right? Recently, we’ve been hearing from many
news media sources, and even from President Obama himself, that one in five college
women experience sexual assault at some time during their tenure as students.
It would be reasonable to assume that the surveys used to arrive at this ratio
actually asked the participants directly whether or not they had been assaulted.

But it turns out the web survey that produced the one-in-five figure did no
such thing. Instead, it asked students whether they had had any of several
categories of experience the study authors later classified as sexual assault,
or attempted sexual assault, in their
analysis. This raises the important question of how we should define sexual
assault when we’re discussing the issue—along with the related question of why
we’re not talking about a crime that’s more clearly defined, like rape. Of
course, whatever you call it, sexual violence is such a horrible crime that
most of us are willing to forgive anyone who exaggerates the numbers or paints
an overly frightening picture of reality in an attempt to prevent future cases. (The issue
is so serious that PolitiFact refrained from applying their trademark
Truth-O-Meter to the one-in-five figure.)

But there are four problems with this
attitude. The first is that for every supposed assault there is an alleged
perpetrator. Dramatically overestimating the prevalence of the crime comes with
the attendant risk of turning public perception against the accused, making it
more difficult for the innocent to convince anyone of their innocence. The
second problem is that by exaggerating the danger in an effort to protect
college students we’re sabotaging any opportunity these young adults may have
to make informed decisions about the risks they take on. No one wants students
to die in car accidents either, but we don’t manipulate the statistics to
persuade them one in five drivers will die in a crash before they graduate from
college. The third problem is that going to college and experimenting with sex
are for many people a wonderful set of experiences they remember fondly for the
rest of their lives. Do we really want young women to barricade themselves in
their dorms? Do we want young men to feel like they have to get signed and
notarized documentation of consent before they try to kiss anyone? The fourth
problem I’ll get to in a bit.

We
need to strike some appropriate balance in our efforts to raise awareness
without causing paranoia or inspiring unwarranted suspicion. And that balance
should be represented by the results of our best good-faith effort to arrive at
as precise an understanding of the risk as our most reliable methods allow. For
this purpose, The Department of Justice’s Campus Sexual
Assault Study,
the source of the oft-cited statistic, is all but completely worthless. It has
limitations, to begin with, when it comes to representativeness, since it
surveyed students on just two university campuses. And, while the overall
sample was chosen randomly, the 42% response rate implies a great deal of
self-selection on behalf of the participants. The researchers did compare late
responders to early ones to see if there was a systematic difference in their
responses. But this doesn’t by any means rule out the possibility that many
students chose categorically not to respond because they had nothing to say,
and therefore had no interest in the study. (Some may have even found it
offensive.) These are difficulties common to this sort of simple web-based
survey, and they make interpreting the results problematic enough to recommend
against their use in informing policy decisions.

The
biggest problems with the study, however, are not with the sample but with the
methods. The survey questions appear to have been deliberately designed to
generate inflated incidence rates. The basic strategy of avoiding direct
questions about whether the students had been the victims of sexual assault is
often justified with the assumption that many young people can’t be counted on
to know what actions constitute rape and assault. But attempting to describe
scenarios in survey items to get around this challenge opens the way for
multiple interpretations and discounts the role of countless contextual
factors. The CSA researchers write, “A surprisingly large number of respondents
reported that they were at a party when the incident happened.” Cathy Young, a
contributing editor at Reason
magazine who analyzed the
study
all the way back in 2011, wrote that

the
vast majority of the incidents it uncovered involved what the study termed
“incapacitation” by alcohol (or, rarely, drugs): 14 percent of female respondents
reported such an experience while in college, compared to six percent who
reported sexual assault by physical force. Yet the question measuring
incapacitation was framed ambiguously enough that it could have netted many
“gray area” cases: “Has someone had sexual contact with you when you were
unable to provide consent or stop what was happening because you were passed
out, drugged, drunk, incapacitated, or asleep?” Does “unable to provide consent
or stop” refer to actual incapacitation – given as only one option in the
question – or impaired judgment? An
alleged assailant would be unlikely to get a break by claiming he was unable to
stop because he was drunk.

This type of confusion is why
it’s important to design survey questions carefully. That the items in the CSA
study failed to make the kind of fine distinctions that would allow for more
conclusive interpretations suggests the researchers had other goals in mind.

The researchers’
use of the blanket term “sexual assault,” and their grouping of attempted with
completed assaults, is equally suspicious. Any survey designer cognizant of all
the difficulties of web surveys would likely try to narrow the focus of the
study as much as possible, and they would also try to eliminate as many sources
of confusion with regard to definitions or descriptions as possible. But, as
Young points out,

The
CSA Study’s estimate of sexual assault by physical force is somewhat
problematic as well – particularly for attempted sexual assaults, which account
for nearly two-thirds of the total. Women were asked if anyone had ever had or
attempted to have sexual contact with them by using force or threat, defined as
“someone holding you down with his or her body weight, pinning your arms,
hitting or kicking you, or using or threatening to use a weapon.” Suppose that,
during a make-out session, the man tries to initiate sex by rolling on top of
the woman, with his weight keeping her from moving away – but once she tells
him to stop, he complies. Would this count as attempted sexual assault?

The simplest way to get around
many of these difficulties would have been to ask the survey participants
directly whether they had experienced the category of crime the researchers were
interested in. If the researchers were concerned that the students might not
understand that being raped while drunk still counts as rape, why didn’t they just
ask the participants a question to that effect? It’s a simple enough question
to devise.

The study did
pose a follow up question to participants it classified as victims of forcible
assault, the responses to which hint at the students’ actual thoughts about the
incidents. It turns out 37 percent of so-called forcible assault victims
explained that they hadn’t contacted law enforcement because they didn’t think
the incident constituted a crime. That bears repeating: a third of the students
the study says were forcibly assaulted didn’t think any crime had occurred.
With regard to another category of victims, those of incapacitated assault,
Young writes, “Not surprisingly, three-quarters of the female students in this
category did not label their experience as rape.” Of those the study classified
as actually having been raped while intoxicated, only 37 percent believed they
had in fact been raped. Two thirds of the women the study labels as incapacitated
rape victims didn’t believe they had been raped. Why so much disagreement on such a
serious issue? Of the entire incapacitated sexual assault victim category, Young
writes,

Two-thirds
said they did not report the incident to the authorities because they didn’t
think it was serious enough. Interestingly, only two percent reported having
suffered emotional or psychological injury – a figure so low that the authors
felt compelled to include a footnote asserting that the actual incidence of
such trauma was undoubtedly far higher.

So the largest category making up
the total one-in-five statistic is predominantly composed of individuals who
didn’t think what happened to them was serious enough to report. And nearly all
of them came away unscathed, both physically and psychologically.

The
impetus behind the CSA study was a common narrative about a
so-called “rape culture” in which sexual violence is accepted as normal and
young women fail to report incidents because they’re convinced you’re just
supposed to tolerate it. That was the researchers’ rationale for using their
own classification scheme for the survey participants’ experiences even when it
was at odds with the students’ beliefs. But researchers have been doing this
same dance for thirty years. As Young writes,

When
the first campus rape studies in the 1980s found that many women labeled as
victims by researchers did not believe they had been raped, the standard
explanation was that cultural attitudes prevent women from recognizing forced
sex as rape if the perpetrator is a close acquaintance. This may have been true
twenty-five years ago, but it seems far less likely in our era of mandatory
date rape and sexual assault workshops and prevention programs on college
campuses.

The CSA also surveyed a large
number of men, almost none of whom admitted to assaulting women. The
researchers hypothesize that the men may have feared the survey wasn’t really
anonymous, but that would mean they knew the behaviors in question were wrong.
Again, if the researchers are really worried about mistaken beliefs regarding
the definition of rape, they could investigate the issue with a few added
survey items.

The huge discrepancies
between incidences of sexual violence as measured by researchers and as
reported by survey participants becomes even more suspicious in light of the history of similar studies. Those campus rape
studies
Young refers to from the 1980s produced a ratio of one in four. Their
credibility was likewise undermined by later surveys that found that most of
the supposed victims didn’t believe they’d been raped, and around forty percent
of them went on to have sex with their alleged assailants again. A more recent
study by the CDC used similar methods—a phone survey with a low response
rate—and concluded that one in five women has been raped at some time in her
life. Looking closer at this study, feminist critic and critic of feminism
Christina Hoff Sommers attributes this finding as well to “a non-representative
sample and vaguely worded questions.” It turns out activists have been conducting
different versions of this same survey, and getting similarly, wildly inflated
results for decades.

Sommers
challenges the CDC findings in a video everyone concerned with the
issue of sexual violence should watch. We all need to understand that
well-intentioned and intelligent people can, and often do, get carried away
with activism that seems to have laudable goals but ends up doing more harm
than good. Some people even build entire careers on this type of crusading. And
PR has become so sophisticated that we never need to let a shortage, or utter
lack of evidence keep us from advocating for our favorite causes. But there’s
still a fourth problem with crazily exaggerated risk assessments—they obfuscate
issues of real importance, making it more difficult to come up with real
solutions. As Sommers explains,

To
prevent rape and sexual assault we need state-of-the-art research. We need
sober estimates. False and sensationalist statistics are going to get in the
way of effective policies. And unfortunately, when it comes to research on
sexual violence, exaggeration and sensation are not the exception; they are the
rule. If you hear about a study that shows epidemic levels of sexual violence
against American women, or college students, or women in the military, I can
almost guarantee the researchers used some version of the defective CDC
methodology. Now by this method, known as advocacy research, you can easily
manufacture a women’s crisis. But here’s the bottom line: this is madness.
First of all it trivializes the horrific pain and suffering of survivors. And
it sends scarce resources in the wrong direction. Sexual violence is too
serious a matter for antics, for politically motivated posturing. And right now
the media, politicians, rape culture activists—they are deeply invested in
these exaggerated numbers.

So while more and more normal,
healthy, and consensual sexual practices are considered crimes, actual acts of
exploitation and violence are becoming all the more easily overlooked in the
atmosphere of paranoia. And college students face the dilemma of either risking
assault or accusation by going out to enjoy themselves or succumbing to the
hysteria and staying home, missing out on some of the richest experiences
college life has to offer.

One
in five is a truly horrifying ratio. As conservative crime researcher Heather McDonald points
out, “Such an assault rate would represent a crime wave unprecedented in
civilized history. By comparison, the 2012 rape rate in New Orleans and its
immediately surrounding parishes was .0234 percent; the rate for all violent
crimes in New Orleans in 2012 was .48 percent.” I don’t know how a woman can
pass a man on a sidewalk after hearing such numbers and not look at him with
suspicion. Most of the reforms rape culture activists are pushing for now chip
away at due process and strip away the rights of the accused. No one wants to
make coming forward any more difficult for actual victims, but our first
response to anyone making such a grave accusation—making any accusation—should be
skepticism. Victims suffer severe psychological trauma, but then so do the
falsely accused. The strongest evidence of an honest accusation is often the
fact that the accuser must incur some cost in making it. That’s why we say
victims who come forward are heroic. That’s the difference between a victim and
a survivor.

Trumpeting crazy
numbers creates the illusion that a large percentage of men are monsters, and
this fosters an us-versus-them mentality that obliterates any appreciation for
the difficulty of establishing guilt. That would be a truly scary world to live
in. Fortunately, we in the US don’t really live in such a world. Sex doesn’t
have to be that scary. It’s usually pretty damn fun. And the vast majority of
men you meet—the vast majority of women as well—are good people. In fact, I’d
wager most men would step in if they were around when some psychopath was
trying to rape someone.